All posts tagged Joni Mitchell

Now that Halloween is over, it’s straight on to Christmas music. Beth Orton is in the vanguard with a new cover of Joni Mitchell’s song “River” that premieres today on Speakeasy.

The song is the first release from an Amazon holiday music playlist called “All Is Bright,” which will feature new seasonal songs along with old favorites (Amazon is keeping the full track list and artists involved under wraps for now). Orton pulls out the melancholy side of the tune, slowing it down and losing the “Jingle Bells” piano vamp that echoed through Mitchell’s version, which appeared on her landmark 1971 album “Blue.”

LOS ANGELES – To the list of cultural touchstones that have Joni Mitchell’s stamp on them, we can add this: “You complete me.” One of the all-time famous movie lines, delivered by Tom Cruise to Renee Zellweger in “Jerry Maguire,” was an homage to Mitchell’s “Court and Spark,” the movie’s writer and director, Cameron Crowe, told a Los Angeles gala crowd on Saturday night.

Mitchell’s lyric goes, “And you could complete me / I’d complete you,” and Crowe said the line has gotten him in trouble with viewers who think it’s a pretty narcissistic way to woo someone.

“I say it’s a tribute to Joni Mitchell and ‘Court and Spark,’” said Crowe. “Shuts them right up.” Read More »

In an era of re-mastered albums and box sets so loaded with from-the-vaults material they should come with their own archivist, there isn’t much from rock’s golden era that hasn’t been released. But earlier this month, recordings from a little-known benefit concert headlined by Joni Mitchell and James Taylor have surfaced for the first time -– 39 years after the fact.

Known as the Amchitka Concert, the performance took place on October 16th 1970 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and its story typifies the earnestness and hey-let’s-put-on-a-show looseness of the period. The organizer, Irving Stowe, a lawyer and founding member of the environmental organization Greenpeace, wanted to raise money to send a protest boat to Amchitka Island in the Aleutians, where the U.S. government was conducting nuclear tests. Stowe knew nothing about concert promotion, but his previous fundraising strategy, selling buttons on the streets of Vancouver, had earned predictably meager returns. “It seemed an insane, outlandish idea,” Stowe’s daughter, Barbara Stowe, said of her late father’s plan. “We had no money. No ties with big-name musicians. But he was a stubborn man.”

Two weeks ago, actress and singer Patti LuPone grabbed a cell phone out of the hand of an audience member who was texting during a performance of her current play, "Shows for Days." The bold move led to an outpouring of support from fans fed up with glowing screens. Ms. LuPone gives us her five rules of theater etiquette.